stories and photographs from sister call's mission in independence, missouri

Monday, 13 January 2014

It's always a great week in Missouri

We made orange rolls with a member's neighbor, Brenda... and taught about Joseph Smith as well. She has this awesome bird and some really great cooking skills. It was a great Saturday!

Whew. What a week. It's always a great week in Missouri.
Seriously though. I feel like I am going to look back on these emails
and every one of them is going to start with "another great week in
Missouri", or "we had so many miracles this week", or "this week was the
best!" I'm not complaining. It's just amazing to me how much the Lord
has blessed me on my mission. Every week we see miracles.

This week I was
exhausted on multiple occasions. I don't know why. Probably because the
Missouri weather messes with my blood pressure and this week we went
from it being 3 degrees on Monday to 65 degrees on Sunday. We got a bunch of snow this week and then it rained all day on Saturday
and all of it melted. So basically for whatever reason I was pretty
tired, but I kept pushing through it and prayed my guts out that I would
be able to just get to work and not complain, and guess what? Every
time we went out to work, no matter how miserable I felt, I ended up
feeling great. Saturday
we had planned to go tracting and I was SO tired and didn't want to do
it, but I knew we needed to. So we go and I get to the first door, give
out a Book of Mormon, and all of a sudden I feel like a million bucks.
Who even needs doctors when I can just do missionary work? That street
was a goldmine though. We taught 7 lessons in an hour and found 2 new
investigators. I am just so grateful that I sucked it up and got to
work. That is probably one of the greatest lessons that I have learned
on my mission, when we are not enough, the Lord will make up the rest. He
always does. He helps us fulfill his purposes and be more than what we
could be on our own. I'm so grateful for some of the health challenges
I've had over the past couple years... they have helped me to dig deeper and realize the power of the Atonement. It is so real!

I've been
thinking about trials recently in terms of a well. Our faith is that
well and those trials make us dig, and dig, and dig... and sometimes we
feel like we are in too deep, like we can't get out of this hole that we
are in. If we rely on the Lord and trust in him, that well is filled
with faith, and we have an even greater reservoir than we had before,
because we have been forced beyond our comfort zone. I have truly
learned that trials help us to know that depth of the Atonement, and
they help us push our faith to greater levels. I'm so grateful for
that!

Things are
going great here in Clinton. It has been a busy, wonderful week. Here's a
miracle! We finally met with our investigator Eric again. He has cancer
and has been out of town and it has been hard to reach him. His wife is
a very active member of the church and he has taken a lot of the lessons before. We
were teaching the Plan of Salvation and really felt like we needed to
teach out of the Book of Mormon, so we did. He was eating it up. Half
the time he wasn't even listening to us, but was reading ahead of what
we had read in the Book of Mormon... not a bad thing right? We had a
great discussion and read some more and by the end of the conversation
he was like "I really need to find out of this is true and I need to do
it soon." He realized that he needed to act! And be baptized! So we set a
date for him to work towards for February 14th,
which is their wedding anniversary. Hopefully he feels well enough! It
is hard to keep appointments because he ends up feeling sick a lot of
the time. I am super excited for him to progress! So there is a huge
miracle of the week.

Oh, our car was rear-ended this week. It wasn't a big deal at all. We were stopped and the
other guy had slowed down quite a bit, but couldn't stop because the
roads were snowy. It was pretty funny because Sister Penman screamed and
I did nothing. It was like time stopped and I casually thought, oh we
just got hit by a car. The guy was really nice and we gave him a mormon.org
card. It was probably the most friendly/casual collision in Clinton
history. We had to fill out a ton of paperwork and things online. That
was annoying.

We also found a great new
investigator named Amanda. She had so many awesome questions, and I was
super grateful for ALL of the personal study time I've had on my mission
because I was able to answer them. It's amazing to look back and see
how much I have learned. I feel like I didn't know anything about the
gospel before my mission, which of course I did know quite a bit, but that is how much I have
learned. I still have so much to learn and principles to deepen my testimony of though. I have gained such a testimony
of scripture STUDY. It is so important to actually study and feast upon
the word of God. One of the greatest feelings is to be studying the
scriptures and to have the Holy Ghost come and teach you things that you
need to learn for yourself and others. Oftentimes these things aren't
even written on the page. It's the best.